International Forum on Population and Development

Launching of South-South Day Statement by Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, Executive Director, UNFPA

Your Excellency, Jianmin Hua, State Councilor and Secretary-General of the State Council, China

Your Excellency, Weiqing Zhang, Chair, Board of Partners in Population and Development and Minister, National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) of China

Excellencies, friends, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to address you again at this particular event, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of Partners in Population and Development – an intergovernmental organization with observer status at the United Nations – and the launching of South-South Day. I congratulate us all for having a special day to celebrate South-South partnership, with the hope that it will remind us every year of the critical role and contribution of partnerships in general and among the developing countries, in particular.

Having a special day to celebrate South-South partnership has serious implications because it places greater responsibilities on the developing countries that succeeded in certain development areas to help others who have been less fortunate to move forward and achieve the same success. I believe that the most critical aspect by which we can measure South-South partnership is its ability to sustain the partnership through the years. And that means sustainability in terms of human and financial resources, as well as institutions and systems. This requires a strategic vision for such partnership and operational programmes that implement this vision and give it added value and distinction among partnerships.

For vision, we have the Programme of Action of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which outlined the long-term results that we all work towards achieving and which has been further strengthened by the world’s agreement on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There are also all of the international conferences of the 1990s that link to each other, beginning with ICPD, to provide a framework for global economic and social progress and cooperation. The agreements reached at these conferences set international standards of what the life of the individual, the community, the nation and the world should be—a life of dignity and well-being, where poverty finds no place and where the empowerment of all members of the family and society is achieved. ICPD, along with the others, give us the “WHY” and the “WHAT”.

For the next 10 years of the South-South partnership, we have to work together to achieve the implementation of this agenda. We need to find the best way to the “HOW”. And this is where South-South partnership can be of most value. To have real value and impact, the partnership must be sustainable and enduring. Within this context, I have five observations to make.

First, South-South partnership should not replicate the United Nations as a multilateral organization nor should it replicate national governments as they strive to find the HOW. It can truly be of real value when it can free itself of such frameworks and find the courage to focus its attention on four main tasks:

(1) Identifying what has worked in one or more countries, providing the answers to how and why it worked and creating links and partnerships for learning purposes within each country and among countries,

(2) Bringing to light daring and courageous initiatives, which have succeeded and can be scaled up, and giving them visibility,

(3) Creating an enabling environment for the best and up-to-date expertise in the developing countries to provide their services to other developing countries,

(4) Strengthening the knowledge base of its membership in terms of the successes to be shared and replicated with due adjustment to national and community settings.

All of these four points are essential for making South-South partnership an effective vehicle for supporting countries which still have a way to go to reach the objectives of ICPD and the Millennium Summit, and in showcasing countries that have succeeded and are achieving the goals.

I say this because it is common knowledge and it is human nature as well, that we all seek value added and enrichment for our lives or our institutions. This is what Partners in Population and Development (PPD) needs to do for the next 10 years of its lifetime for its membership to expand and for its support to be sustained.

Second, we have heard throughout the Forum and certainly today from Steven Sinding, Director-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), that the world has lost a ‘sense of crisis or urgency” with regard to reproductive health and this translates itself into lower funding for such programmes. This is very true.

But let us think of this analogy. When one airplane crashes killing those who are on it, the event makes media headlines, but when half a million women die every year from preventable causes, no one hears about it. It gets very little attention in the media. We will know that the sense of urgency has returned when international, regional and national media scream at us as they announce: “It is a crime in the 21st century that one woman dies every minute of the day—that means 60 women in one hour and 1,440 women in one day; it is a crime when raping women becomes a military tool to break the enemy; it is a crime when women are battered by their own relatives and it is a crime when women are the poorest of the poor; it is a crime when women are sold in slavery by traffickers at a time when declarations are filled with human rights slogans; it is a crime when nations spend more on producing armaments than on their commitment to achieve the MDGs and when nations spend more on buying arm than their investment in education, health, housing and meeting the other needs of their people.” Creating this sense of urgency can certainly be one of the focal roles of South-South partnership.

Third, South-South partnership can demonstrate through its networks of membership that investment in health and education in developing countries gives many returns to the individual, the community and the nation. Advocating for development and demonstrating its impact through the four main tasks mentioned above would clarify by demonstration the sense of urgency and will show the “HOW”.

Four, the partnership requires developing countries to be truly disciplined in terms of having the qualified person in the relevant function. If we examine why scaling up is not possible, we meet a reason that is not often discussed when raising issues of lack of human resources. In many developing countries, qualified personnel and experts that have both the knowledge and the accumulated experience are moved to other functions and areas of work in which they have less comparative advantage. Thus, the purpose and expected results of their education and experience are lost to the country as a whole.

Five, South-South partnership would have to strive to ensure that financial self-sufficiency for its operations is not only possible, but is a reality. We heard today that South-South partnership cannot survive without resources. Yes, this is very true and it is a fact of life. But this fact makes me think of an Arabic saying: “No one can scratch your back like your own nails.” This is not to take away or discount the responsibility of the North and the support they provide. Countries of the North have made the commitment so many times. But we all learned a lesson that such resources are not limitless, nor are they all neutral. It is estimated that the United Nations system provides a mere 1 per cent of resource flows for development. Its strength is in its technical assistance support. Most of the resources for development purposes come from the industrialized countries, but such resources are subject to many variables, as Steve Sinding has clearly outlined this morning.

Therefore, the commitment to South-South partnership by its membership must be translated into predictable and sustained financial investment in the partnership. Yes, the donor countries can support certain activities and initiatives, and they should do so. But sustaining the actual membership and its institutional costs must come from the membership itself as well as funding from strategic partnership activities. This is a prerequisite for convincing the world that South-South partnership is a viable modality for transfer of development approaches and methodologies. It is also a demonstration of the political commitment to a highly political priority. Sustainability of Partners in Population and Development, as a vehicle for South-South partnership, as one mechanism for such cooperation, means: good governance by its leadership; effective and developed human capacity that is creative and innovative to meet the challenges; and streamlined institutional structure and efficient systems, including a monitoring and evaluation system to demonstrate the effectiveness of South-South partnership as a modality for enhancing development. These are the same ingredients for the sustainability of development in any country.

Finally, with regard to UNFPA, we have adopted South-South partnership as one of our strategic areas of support for the years to come. It is in our Multi-Year Funding Framework (MYFF), which is our strategic plan, for the next four years. We are also in the process of revising our resource allocation system in order to align it with the MDGs so that countries are categorized for assistance in terms of their level of achievement of the ICPD as well as the Millennium Development Goals. We are looking at countries that have achieved or are close to the full achievement of the MDGs and examining ways to promote them as vehicles for South-South partnership in the specific areas of their success. We are also identifying the means for doing that, including having some resources available within the country programme allocation for South-South transmission of experience and knowledge. We hope that by doing so, we can play a part, albeit small, in the tremendously important South-South alliances and partnerships for development.

I say all this with a hope in the back of my mind—that in celebrating South-South partnership 10 years from now, we will find a sustained and sustainable partnership that is built on the commitment of its membership as the primary source of investment in human and institutional resources, with support from international organizations and donor countries as a secondary source.

Again, I congratulate all of us for launching the South-South Day, which marks the beginning of a more serious commitment to South-South partnership.

Thank you.